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It's surprising to me how people consistently try to discourage traits in children which they at the same time glorify in adults.

I suppose considering how much effort society puts into raising meager people, it's only right we glorify those who manage to manage to grow as a person regardless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143514

Der Grundsatz des »geringeren Übels« ist der Grundsatz der Verzweiflung. Meist zieht es die Sache nur solange hinaus, bis das größere Übel den Sieg davonträgt. Wenn man das zu tun wagt, was recht und menschlich ist, und wenn man an die Macht der Stimme der Humanität und Wahrheit glaubt, dann geht man ein geringeres Risiko ein, als wenn man sich auf den sogenannten Realismus des Opportunismus verläßt.

[..]

Ich glaube, daß es für uns heute nur eine entscheidende Frage gibt: die nach Krieg oder Frieden. Der Mensch kann leicht alles Leben auf unserer Erde vernichten oder alle Zivilisation und alle Werte bei den Übriggebliebenen zerstören und eine barbarische, totalitäre Organisation aufbauen, die den Rest der Menschheit beherrscht. Sich dieser Gefahr bewußt zu werden und die Doppelzüngigkeit zu durchschauen, deren man sich überall bedient, um zu verhindern, daß die Menschen den Abgrund sehen, auf den sie sich zubewegen, ist unsere einzige Verpflichtung, das einzige moralische und intellektuelle Gebot, das wir heute zu respektieren haben. Tun wir es nicht, so sind wir alle zum Untergang verurteilt. Sollten wir alle bei einer atomaren Massenvernichtung umkommen, so wird das nicht daran liegen, daß der Mensch nicht fähig war, menschlich zu werden, oder daß er von Natur aus böse ist; es wird daran liegen, daß der Konsens der Dummheit ihn daran hinderte, die Wirklichkeit zu sehen und sich dementsprechend zu verhalten.

Erich Fromm

Free speech and anti-corporate attitudes are traditionally liberal values. Nowadays, you see arguments from bigots that oppose corporate power over free speech. We shouldn't be forced to withdraw our positions on free speech or corporate power just because they're associated with bigotry now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127342

Given the track record of institutional science and the ever-growing list of regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise, why do so many people seem to think that simply doubling down and bullying the general population into compliance with expert consensus will ever work? What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy crisis because it has failed to police its own corruption and failed to address its own limitations and vulnerabilities? What if everyday people can see this more clearly than those striving on the margins of these institutions?

Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight. Our numbers are growing, and I know many people who fight every day to ensure we will never be ruled by unquestionable expert consensus. Anyone who has been inside these institutions knows exactly how petty and arbitrary the hierarchical structures can be. I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

I think the constant stream of these articles just illustrates the massive social blind spot that comes from training STEM professionals solely for careers rather than for citizenship, communication and community membership. STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24063302

I cannot see any implementation of UBI working any better than things now unless the predatory nature of those in power is put in check.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23996105

I'm sick of reading internet arguments about polymorphism and browser monoculture and borrow checking and static linking. Someone please tell me where I can go on the internet to read biologists arguing about their favorite animals.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883563

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

Ivan Illich

"Deschooling Society"

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

"A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles"

Polizeigewalt betrifft alle. Auch wenn es Minoritäten zuerst trifft.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ ... in_hamburg_jetzt/fw9gigw/

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Philip K. Dick

Why not just cut out the middleman and eat from a bag of sugar directly?

comment on "PepsiCo cuts out grocery stores and sells directly to consumers"

For if the doctrine of free-will has raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have sought to persuade other men’s wills with threats, fines, imprisonments, torture, the spike, the wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them good and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine of Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this, the doctrine of Materialistic Determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitical characters, who are this now and that at some other time, and anything and nothing upon principle. “My conditions have made me so,” they cry, and there is no more to be said; poor mirror-ghosts! how could they help it! To be sure, the influence of such a character rarely reaches so far as that of the principled persecutor; but for every one of the latter, there are a hundred of these easy, doughy characters, who will fit any baking tin, to whom determinist self-excusing appeals; so the balance of evil between the two doctrines is about maintained.

Voltairine de Cleyre

"The Dominant Idea"